Reaching new heights: How have Europeans grown so tall?

Alex Tabarrok links to some new research further establishing the conclusion that being tall makes people happy:

Urban economics studies the geographic distribution of economic activity. In most urban economic models, the reason that cities aren’t taller is that, per square meter of useable space, taller buildings cost more to physically make. (Supporting quotes below.) According to this usual theory, buildings only get taller when something else compensates for these costs, like a scarce ocean view, or higher land prices.

Here is the abstract to a new paper by Angus Deaton and Raksha Arora.

Artist Nickolay Lamm created illustrations that compare the body measurements of the average middle-aged man from the United States, Japan, France, and the Netherlands. Not surprisingly, Americans are fat compared to other countries. An illustration of the average 30- to 39-year-old man from the United States, Japan, the Netherlands, and France are shown from left to right.

The genome of a young boy buried at Mal’ta near Lake Baikal in eastern Siberia some 24,000 years ago has turned out to hold two surprises for anthropologists. The first is that the boy’s DNA matches that of Western Europeans, showing that during the last Ice Age people from Europe had reached farther east across Eurasia than previously supposed. Although none of the Mal’ta boy’s skin or hair survive, his genes suggest he would have had brown hair, brown eyes and freckled skin.

SINCE late last year commodity prices have been on a long, slow downward slide. Yet many in the markets, like Jeremy Grantham, a British money manager, reckon that the commodity-price spike of the past decade is but a taste of what's to come.

We recently brought you a set of images showing what Barbie and other dolls would look like without the makeup that Mattel paints on their faces.